Embedded graphics development and design

Main menu

Category Archives: Newsletter

There is nothing like starting off the new year with a massive show like CES, in Las Vegas!

Crank Software’s Storyboard Suite will be well represented at CES this year. Storyboard 3.2 will be showcased in the Texas Instruments Technology Village (N115 in the North Hall) as well as in the Green Hills Software Hospitality Suite located at the Venetian Hotel.

In-Car and Medical

Expect to see Storyboard Suite 3.2 running on a Jacinto 6 powering an automotive cluster unit as well as on a Beagle Bone Black displaying a rich medical device user interface.

Crank Storyboard™ Suite enables UI Designers and Embedded Developers with the ability to quickly prototype, develop and deploy rich animated user interfaces for embedded devices. The upcoming Storyboard™ Suite 3.0 release has a number of new and improved features including animation timeline, iOS support, custom shaders, internationalization, and image optimization just to name a few.

Click on the video to see a sneak peak of what to expect with the new animation timeline!

Crank will have a booth this year at Design West in San Jose California March 26th – 29th 2012.

Our very own Jason Clarke, VP of Sales & Marketing, will be giving a talk on the subject of “Collaborative GUI Development” on March 29th from 3:15PM – 4:15PM in the San Carlos room. Be sure to stop by and listen to what Jason has to say.

It has been running well on x86 for several weeks now, but as always no source code that is supposed to be platform agnostic is ever as clean as it should be, so it took a few days of tinkering to get it up and running on all of the important architectures that QNX supports. As much as WebKit is touted as being more “embedded friendly”, we still ended up spending a week doing some light tuning to improve its performance on lower end hardware (A note to QNX developers out there repetitive file open’s are not your friend … but more on that later).

We’ve got lots of ideas on how we can Crank up the performance of these browsers even further but for now, we’re excited about what we’ve brought to QNX Neutrino 6.4.0: A modern web browser framework (WebKit) running in a high performance graphics environment (AG) that runs on the four major processor families (x86, PowerPC (PPC), SuperH (SH), ARM) supported by QNX.

We’re working in conjunction with QNX to get a new WebBrowser project seeded into Foundry27, the QNX developer portal and will be making binaries available for users to try (in addition to our original Photon port). However, in the meantime, if you are interested in integrating web browsing technology into your product and want to know more about how WebKit might work for you, give us a shout.

In case you were wondering what the platforms were were running on, here’s the list of which evaluation boards and platforms that we used for testing:

The Crank Software Inc.(CSI) team is very pleased to offer you an update on our recent advancements. If you are interested in learning more about Crank Software please register here.

The increasing demand for sophisticated user interfaces in the embedded market has been turbo charged by the iPhone effect. Consumers expect this next generation of functionality in environments that do not have rich CPU and memory configurations. They also expect this from companies that do not have the sizeable development armies of Apple. This creates a significant challenge for a massive market trend. In short order everything from your remote control to your refrigerator will have a graphical user interface. The adage, everything but the kitchen sink, may very well apply.

There has been significant advancement in Crank Software in the last six months involving:

Crank product development

WebKit and Firefox development and integration

Customer engagements

Growing of team and partnerships

Our Crank product development is going extremely well and is currently ready for targeted deployment! We are very excited as trials have proven our technology to be very strategic and effective. Product attributes include:

Software free user interface design resulting in rapid development by artists and designers

Eclipse based product seamlessly integrating into your development environment

Simplified integration of the user interface into the rest of the system

Runtime with fractional CPU impact

Ability to easily move designs between heterogeneous platforms

Software upgrades via plugins to extend functionality without impacting the existing system

Ease of customization and skinnability

Current customers engagements are active, helping us to develop an intimate understanding of the unique embedded graphical user interface product space. Every customer has become a reference demonstrating Crank’s commitment to effective partnerships.

We have been quite busy growing the team and forming strategic business partnerships. Crank is pleased to announce strategic partnerships with: